On 4 Jun 2004 06:39:13 -0700, (Mike) wrote:

The beginning of the end was a long time ago when Newt Gingrich
sucessfully got spending on these things cut back during his tenure in
congress. If you recall the republicans at that time were decrying a
liberal imbalance in funded arts programs and citing such works as
Maplethorpe? for being vulgar and having no real value.

After those cutbacks public broadcasting, both TV and radio suddenly
started have corporate tag lines before and after programs. They
essentially ammount to commercials and they have gotten more and more
like the traditional broadcast commercials. Obviously this is because
they are courting money from big corporations.

So any further cutbacks would be the end.

Eliminating federal funding for broadcasting would definitely be
the end of federal funding for public broadcasting (sorry for the
tautology), but since it's already such a low percentage of their
budget, things wouldn't change much. (They might drop Weekend Edition,
or regretably, "From The Top" but I have no doubt they'd keep "Car
Talk.")

But it would certainly NOT be the end of these "they're cutting
funding for Public Broadcasting" chain letters.

In another response in this thread, wrote:

I guess this is an appropriate time to post this:
The following has made the rounds recently and is purportedly penned
by a college instructor with help from his networking class.

Hi Folks. I am sure that some of you who receive this will see that
some parts of this message apply to you.
Please do not be insulted, as this is just a general list of rules to
live by when you are on-line, or sending e-mail.

Years ago I was on a mailing list where chain letters were often
forwarded, and every time, someone would post a similar response text.
It seemed like a waste of bandwidth, so I put the text on my website,
and posted the URL every time I saw a chain letter posted:
http://www.mindspring.com/~benbradley/gulltest.html
Some of the links may be dead, but the idea expressed holds up as well
as ever.
In retrospect, posting the whole text was probably more effective,
since the perpetrators are less likely to go to a website than to read
text right in front of their noses.

But the current product
already is far from what we once knew.

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http://mindspring.com/~benbradley